Pronunciation

Most teachers of English will have come across a sound chart at some point, but few realise how arbitrary they are. I do not mean 'arbitrary' in the negative sense of 'with no good reason', but rather in the sense that there are choices that the designer has had to make. At every stage in the creation of a chart, the author will have made decisions which could equally well have been otherwise.

Do you use the phonemic script in teaching? If you say, "It depends", what does it depend on? What are the pros and cons of the IPA? What kind of students does it help, and how does it help them? These are some of the issues broached in this paper.

Mark Hancock, in an interview with Andi White for IATEFL Online, talks about English as a Lingua Franca and about pronunciation as a listening skill. Read the transcript on the PDF below. Listen to the talk about pronunciation for listening here.

Pronunciation is not only about the mouth, but also the ears. And, with English being a global language, the ears must learn to be flexible in order to make sense of all those varieties of spoken English out there. This article is about helping learners to deal with this variety.

In this article, guest author Ricardo Sili suggests what teachers should prioritize when teaching English pronunciation to Brazilian speakers. The article first appeared in the IATEFL pron-sig newsletter Speak Out.